Colleagues-- My name is Christopher Shelton, I'm 54 and live in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I haven't been studying Greek for a year as I was in New York City caring for my father, who is 85. Before that I was studying Machen and before that a method created by Prof. Dora Pozzi at the University of Houston. I tried getting into the tempo of a group that started with JACT's Reading Greek, but I have fallen behind there as well. I'm beginning to feel like Jude the Obscure. Is anyone beginning an elementary Greek group? My email is christophershelt@bellsouth.netThank you.Chris

Lucus Eques wrote:I was considering starting a group study/reading of Athenaze, vol. 1 through Skype. I also had in mind that the primary language used for discussion would be Latin.

Anyone else feel up for that?

I'd be up for participating, although I'm not sure how my spoken Latin holds up (never tried yet).

Having worked through both volumes earlier this year, I've now resolved to go back through them again to solidify my readings skills. So far I've just transcribed the first two chapters and translated them into Latin, but I was planning on abandoning this last stage as it's very time consuming and I'm not sure completely necessary. I'd love to help out in the group as much as I can.

Lucus Eques wrote:I also am debating the translation/transcription for Athenaze. I didn't the first round, and now I feel I'm paying for it ... all those diacritics and accents are time consuming at first!

How about those who feel successful in their writing skills in Greek now? If you used Athenaze, how did you make it there?

I don't know if you prioritize writing by hand, but I prefer typing my Greek because of speed issues. It's taken me some time to get used to, but I can keep up a decent rate at www.typegreek.com. I prefer this site to the other Greek converter mentioned in the Greek Forum, because this doesn't suffer from the infuriating delay in applying diacritics, etc. I'm interested to see how I fare when it comes to Vol. II, because that's when it got a lot tougher the first time around, vocabulary piling up...

If anyone is interested, I'm saving a text file of my transcriptions, so ideally at some point I'll have the whole book available. I don't mean this as a way to pirate the book, but as a study aide. Besides, lacking the marginal notes, Enchiridion, exercises, etc. it wouldn't be terribly useful on its own.

I am currently reading: Greek: An Intensive Course by Hardy Hansen and Gerald Quinn.There is little to no online help for this text and I would love to see a new group start for it. I've been through Athenaze and it moves very slowly in the beginning. For those of us who have already been through Greek or some other classical text before, a rapid text like Hansen and Quinn would be perfect.

I have completed the first volume of Athenaze without much success and I am going to begin from the very first chapter onwards. I would like to develop more writing and expressive skills in Attic so, if such a group begins, I'll join.

Thanks for your advise. I have begun from chapter second and I am recording the exercises on a note-book. I don't have microphone but I do have microphone from my mp3 player, so eventually I will record some lessons. Another thing I would like to consider is Attic blogging. I do have a Commonplace book where I write Latin daily in order not to get my Latin lost. Sometimes I write there in Greek but I am not able to write more than five or six lines. I recommend such a commonplace book to practise Latin, since we cannot speak every day in Latin. Why is Latin blogging spread in such a way and the same thing doesn't occur to Attic? Reading Attic blogs from Greek students would be something encouraging. We could post the final exercises from Athenaze's lessons on a colective blog and then offer also our Latin rendition of them. At the middle of Athenaze is offered an adapted Herodotus, so it could be encouraging and very interesting. This could be our "beginner's group". Instead of open a new "forum", we could focuse on writing lessons and then post our doubts (here in Textkit) which arised from our personal doubts in composition. Let's grow the idea. What do you think? Cosa ne pensate?

[I've become a bit joker today. I accompany every proposition with an adagium from Erasmus´ collection. ]

Well, I've been working on a beta version for the blog. I have to type the two exercises which lack and we have the second lesson (one is a mere translation to Latin of O ΔΟΥΛΟΣ and the other one consists in the questions shown at the end of the second lesson). I need also to write about the blog's aim in Latin and Greek but this may wait a while.

Here it's the plan:

-Οne of ours will prepare an orientative vocabulary for every lesson. I have done the first one, so another one should do another for lesson third and I will do another for lesson fourth and so on.-We may do the exercises of translation Greek-Italian, Italian-Greek changing Italian for Latin. Ok? -Then, we could also translate the little Greek paragraph which is offered at the end of the lesson (for instance, in the second lesson we have O ΔΟΥΛΟΣ) in Latin.-Finally, we can answer the question based on the paragraph as if we were writing a composition. We read the questions and then we elaborate our own text -based upon the text given.Nota bene: The only single part of the lesson which is to be done by only one is the vocabulary. The writing and translating parts are to be published together in order to share and compare what we do.

I have sent an invitation to Luke to be able to access the blog. If anyone is interested in the project, he can contact us here.

If you refer to our collaborative blog, of course, it's still on. The idea is still the same. If you want to participate, write here (or privately) an e-mail address or any google/blogger account which I can send an invitation to and you'll get the access to the blog to publish your lessons. I myself publish a lesson every weekend and sporadically Greek-Latin translations but one can follow the rhythm he wants.